Wednesday, September 07, 2011

A necro, in the context of forums, is when you respond to a topic thread where there have been no posts for a very long time. Basically you're reviving a dead topic.

Adding a post to a blog which has been silent for over three years should qualify as a pretty nice necro as well.

I won't promise that I'll return with new posts here in a regular manner. In fact that's highly unlikely, but I felt a need to revisit the old place.

Since my last post I've gone over to the side of evil. With my BA in comparative literature I now qualify for the league of the bads. It's a well known fact that no-one with an academic exam in anything literature has even the slightest ability to produce the literature they study. Umberto Eco would be a good example, I guess.

That said, I've seen my daughter grow from toddlerhood to the points where she's tentatively taking the first steps at being a consumer of literature. I've also seen the birth and death of my son, and he spent too much time trying to learn to live to have a shot at anything literature at all. Well, I guess he was a tad young for such a taste to begin with. It is, after all, supposedly an aqquired taste.

I have also, rather obviously, read a bit. More theory than fiction I'm afraid, but given the state of some of the theory I've read I'm now very much in a position to share a secret with you -- the difference, all too often, between literary theory and the fiction it pertains, is that the fiction at least has a semblance of relation with reality.

The underlying reason is mainly that adacemics in the field of humanistics share a pathologic fear of anything which can be measured, extrapolated, described in a commonly agreed terminology, or simply be understood at all. If there's a perfectly sound way of telling something in a few terse sentences, rest assured that it can be told in obtuse academese lasting a full page or more.

Oh, I almost forgot. In the field of humanistics it is considered ethically correct, from a scientific point of view, to collect a single data-point and draw far reaching conclusions concerning an entire field of knowledge from it. Coming from the field of science myself I can tell you that while there certainly is a lot of academics about humanistics, there's absolutely nothing scientific about it at all. It fails, and explicitly so, to survive any of the standard requirements for science.

That said, I can't wait to continue my studies in the field. While too many active within it have lost touch with reality, the field as such lends itself to vast oceans of knowledge and thinking. Maybe not science, but definitely knowledgeable thinking.

Well, this is me signing out after a session of random ramblings. Enjoy your day. I will.